Power Does Not Equal Love
by The Seven of Us
Summary: Sixteen years after Bellatrix joined the Dark Lord and became the most feared witch in the UK, she found a little boy, abandoned on the porch of a muggle village. But his power…his power she could feel from across the street. So of course she had to take him home. Mother/son relationship. AU. By Ruby. JUST A TEASER!


**Ruby: Hi, Ruby here! I'm also the author of ****All Together, Cousins****, a Percy Jackson and the Olympians fanfic that you can find on our (really crappy) Bio. **

**This fanfic isn't actually a true fanfic, just an idea put to paper with frequent time-skips. But this fanfic centers on Bellatrix Black and her character, mainly, rather than Harry's character, although his character is always fun to write as well. I love Bellatrix for a lot of reasons: wicked with a wand, her actor in the movie, and some of the moves she pulls off in canon (though admittedly dastardly) are ****_awesome_****. She and Flitwick are my two favorite HP character duelists, mainly because they are known duelists and yet so little is known about them, their families, their backgrounds, how they got where they were now (or then). There are ****_hundreds_**** of ways that I could portray them. Just as I made Bellatrix (sort of) good in this, I could make Flitwick evil, because we don't know why they're in the position they are.**

**Anyway. Just some food for thought. Enjoy!**

* * *

Bellatrix Lestrange.

No.

Bellatrix Black, now.

Her lip curled at her surname. Her surname had carried nothing but bad memories for her. Sixteen years of trying to live up to her family's standards, of trying to gain their favor, of trying to be loved.

Loveless.

An apt word for the most feared witch in the UK.

She stalked along the muggle sidewalk, her lips stuck in what seemed to be a permanent sneer. Normally she'd be tearing these houses down out of sheer spite.

But that was not to be.

Her Lord—her most powerful and beloved Lord—had been defeated by a mere babe. She shuddered to think how powerful that babe would grow into.

A lone tear traced her cheek in grief for her Lord. She swiped it roughly away.

She was Bellatrix Black! _The_ notorious Bellatrix Black! She did _not_ cry!

The notorious Bellatrix Black was distracted from her inner fuming by magic.

Oh, how she loved magic! She lived in it, she loved the power, she fought to be immersed in it.

But this was a Muggle town!

But the magic was there, nearly visible ropes of sheer power circling slowly around a center point. She'd walked right into one of the ropes, distracted by the grief and anger inside. She shuddered with pleasure as energy swept through her.

Bellatrix looked carefully at the centerpoint. It seemed to be a bundle of clothes.

She walked closer.

It was a babe.

A babe with an already-famous lightning scar on his forehead.

"How?" she whispered, gently touching the silky tuft of black hair. "How did you defeat my Lord? Why are you here, in a Muggle town?"

He opened his eyes, a brilliant emerald green, a shade darker than an _Avada Kedavra_ spell. He smiled, looking a little bit confused. "'adfoot turned inta a gir'?"

Against her will, Bellatrix smiled. Oh, Sirius. "I'm not Sirius, little one. I'm his sister, Bellatrix."

The babe studied her with frank curiosity.

"Come here," she said softly, picking him up. "You don't belong here. No wizard would belong here."

With a swirl of her cloak, Bellatrix and Harry vanished with a soft pop.

* * *

"Trixie, _really_?" eight-year-old Harry groaned to his adopted mother.

Bellatrix looked as dangerous as ever, and right now she looked supremely irritated. "You've been slacking off, young man. Either you put forth more effort in the dueling room or classes will start the moment you roll out of bed."

Harry groaned.

* * *

Harry flattened himself to the ground as his feet hit the floor and rolled to the side as two more ground-level spells that did who-knew-what zoomed by his left ear and crashed into the wall behind him, splattering it with paint apparently mixed with acid or something, because the wall smoked and disintegrated where the 'paint' landed.

He somersaulted out his door and jumped higher than he ever thought he could to avoid more spells. Harry tripped, fell down the stairs, turned the final impact into a backwards somersault, and catapulted into the breakfast niche. A cartwheel across the table (and miraculously not knocking anything over) later, Harry flumped down into his seat, panting.

"Well," he said, grinning cheekily. "That's one way to wake someone up."

Bellatrix shook her head, curls bouncing, her grey eyes sparkling with amusement. "You fell down the stairs. I've _never_ heard of someone falling down stairs to avoid spellfire."

Harry nearly snorted his milk. "Yeah?" he challenged. "What about Tonks?"

"Tonks doesn't count, because she's always been challenged with her…motor skills. Or lack thereof."

Harry grimaced. "Point."

* * *

"Dear God," almost-ten-year-old Harry panted, faceplanting into his plate, which was thankfully empty. "Is this _training_ ever going to be done?"

"You'll be training until you leave the house," Bellatrix said, amused.

"It's not training, it's _torture_," Harry complained.

Her smile vanished. "No, Potter, this is merely work. When you are unfortunate enough to be held under the Cruciatus, come back and say that this is torture without saying a bold-faced _lie_."

She swept around and exited the breakfast niche, the suddenly frosty air following her.

Harry added another word on the _Do Not Say Around Trix_ list, exhaling.

* * *

"I'm sorry," ten-and-three-quarters Harry whispered meekly. "I-I didn't…"

Bellatrix patted the couch next to her. "C'mere, Harry."

Harry sat next to her, their thighs brushing. Bellatrix wrapped him in a hug.

"I was born into the Black family, as you well know," Bellatrix told him softly. "I had two brothers and two sisters. I always competed for attention from our parents. I always did what they told me. I always tried to satisfy my parents.

"The oldest was Andy—you know her daughter, Tonks. She always excelled at school, she was Head Girl in her seventh year and the top of her year since second year. Second oldest was Narcissa. She had all the looks, a master of the Mind Magics by her third year. Then there was Sirius after Cissy. He was the odd one in our family. He shunned us, fell in with your father. I have no doubt that he could have been a master at many things if he had tried anything but pranking. Then there was me, always Momma's perfect little girl, master of the Dark Arts before she went to school. And finally, there was Regulus. He and Sirius stuck together until Sirius went to school and got Sorted into Gryffindor. He was never a true master at anything, although he excelled at Potions.

"I gave up trying to gain my parents' approval at sixteen," she told him softly. "They never responded, never showed pride, never showed affection even when it was just me and them, which was rare anyways. Three months later, I joined the Dark Lord."

Goosebumps rose on her pale skin.

Harry had surprise written all over his face. "You thought power equaled love, didn't you?" he questioned quietly.

Bellatrix nodded. "I didn't realize how much of a fool I was. I never did, until the night the Potters were betrayed and I rescued _you_ off the doorstep of some Muggle's home. And even then…it took me years before I figured it out. I loved you because your power was wild and free and unrestrained. And then, as the years went on and you learned to control it until even I couldn't tell you between a Muggle, I realized I still loved you—for _you_. For the unconditional love that you showed me. You never showed disgust or hatred or indifference. You called me Aunty and some word with more 'w's than coherent sounds. You called me Rabbit because of some silly Muggle cereal. You never called me _freak_, or _madwoman_, even if both were quite true. I was insane for sixteen years. I _caused_ insanity. I _killed_ people. I maimed witches and wizards and Squibs and Muggles alike. I don't even remember half of it, because _you_—not your power, _you_—brought me back to reality. You brought me back to a reality in which at least _one_ person loved me."

Harry curled closer to Bellatrix, not sure what to make of that.

"You'll be going to school with a boy whose parents I tortured into insanity," Bellatrix whispered. "His last name is Longbottom. I'm not sure what his first name is."

Harry chewed on his lip. "You said you served the Dark Lord," he said hesitantly. "You've said since before I can remember that Voldemort is coming back. What happens to you when that happens?"

Bellatrix hesitated. "I do not know."

Harry curled closer to his adopted mother unhappily, not liking that answer.

Bellatrix gave him a soft smile and ran her hand through his messy hair. Her smile grew as shield flickered around the two protectively.

Harry didn't even know he did it.

* * *

**_Fifth year, at the battle of the Ministry…_**

Harry twirled his wand expertly through his fingers, deflecting spells and using others that some definitely wouldn't approve of.

A mad cackle got his attention from the space around the Veil. Trix was pummeling Sirius back, back towards the Veil.

"_NO!_" he yelled. "_No, Trixie!_"

He shot off two more spells and downed the Death Eaters with surprising ease, sprinting towards the fight.

"No, Harry, I can do this!" Sirius called.

Harry threw himself in front of Sirius, a golden sphere of energy crackling around the two. Faster than Sirius could believe, Harry fired off three spells that Sirius recognized before firing another four that he didn't

Sirius's heart chilled as, with Lily's high cheekbones and James's defined jaw and his head held high, his lips curled in a sneer with just a hint of teeth, that he realized that Harry looked distinctly Black.

Bellatrix retaliated with the ferocity of a wild tiger.

The fight was drawing attention as Harry dueled toe-to-toe with the most feared witch in the UK and possibly the whole of Europe and Asia as well, lights flashing back and forth in a dazzling, sometimes sickly, rainbow.

Voldemort hexed Harry in the back, but Harry whipped out another wand from seemingly nowhere and blocked it, sending a volley of spells at Voldemort.

"Those who are not part of the solution, Sirius, are part of the problem!" Harry ground out, his brow furrowed in concentration. "So either get out of the way or help me with Trix!"

Sirius fired at Bellatrix, edging away from Harry so that she would have to switch targets to get away unhexed.

Dumbledore and the Aurors finally crashed the party, to see that nine of the thirteen Death Eaters were down and Harry was dueling both Voldemort and Bellatrix at the same time with Sirius helping out on the Bellatrix side.

Some of the Aurors stopped dead, stunned that five fifth-years and a fourth-year could wreak this much havoc on Voldemort and his best.

Dumbledore fairly flew to Harry's aid, attacking Voldemort swiftly, and the Aurors not gawking at the destruction helped the other five teens take down the rest of the Death Eaters and made sure the others stayed down.

As soon as Dumbledore entered the fight, Harry turned back to Bellatrix and touched his two wandtips together and fired a spell that nobody recognized, a burst of bright red with hints of orange and pink. The spell shattered the shield that she had put up and struck her directly in the heart.

She dropped her wand and bent double, shuddering and gasping.

Aurors fired a volley of stunners.

Harry raised a golden shield that caused all the stunners to bounce off. "Stop," he ordered. "Stun her and get something akin to a troll."

Dumbledore and Voldemort had created a path of destruction out of the Department of Mysteries, so it was silent as everyone watched Bellatrix recover from whatever spell Harry fired and looked around, scooping up her wand and sheathing it. Harry lurched forward, smiling softly, limping on one leg. "Welcome back, Trixie."

Bellatrix wrapped him in a hug, shuddering softly. "How many…?"

"Caught Ron with a tripping jinx and made him twist his ankle, and Hermione got brushed with a Cutting Curse to the leg. That's it," Harry reassured her, returning the hug. "Most of it was against me, and you know I can defend myself. You ensured it. Now, are we going to go get rid of that damn bastard that made you this way or what?"

"Harry…?" Ron asked fearfully.

"I'd like to introduce you all to the woman to trained me every day to survive since I turned six," Harry said, smiling. "But I think we're in a tight spot, and introductions will have to wait for later."

Bellatrix took the hint and ran after Dumbledore and Voldemort. Harry followed her closely.

Harry ducked, rolled, stood, and dodged in three seconds after he entered the battle ground in the Ministry's atrium, firing a Cutting Curse and a Blasting Curse towards Voldemort. Bellatrix, two steps in front of him, was already firing off a string of spells while dodging both Dumbledore's (who was behind her) and Voldemort's spells.

Harry had fought _against_ his adopted mother several times before, either in mock-dueling or for real when her grip on reality slipped. But fighting _next_ to her—something he'd never been able to do, as the rest of the Wizarding World was out for her blood with only two exceptions, and those two weren't about to go against the Boy-Who-Lived-to-be-Hyphenated _and_ the most feared witch in the UK, and possibly Eurasia as a whole—fighting _next_ to her…it was unreal.

And he knew Bellatrix. She was one of the few who could sense and thrive off of other's power, and she was standing in the middle of three powerhouses.

And so, for the first time since he was six, he unleashed his iron grip on his magic.

His mother laughed with glee at the magic pulsating around her, both from the bodily magic that Dumbledore, Voldemort, and Harry gave off, and also the leftover energy from the many, many spells that flew through the air.

Harry was just trying to get used to the feeling. He felt giddy, feather-light, and altogether not very battle-worthy. Powerful. He was half-afraid that if he gripped either of his two wands too hard they'd snap like dead, rotten twigs.

_Magic is about intent…_ a half-forgotten lesson drifted through his head. _Magic running rampant has some rather interesting side effects: giddiness, time-warping, warping in general. Regulus, when he was a kid and wanted to be left alone, built entire wards out of sheer _want_ to be left alone._

He _intended_ to focus. He _wanted _to focus, but it was increasingly hard to _and_ sustain the magical waves. Someone could yell, "SQUIRREL!" and he'd look for one.

A squirrel chittered into life on top of the goblin statue's head. Harry very nearly facepalmed in exasperation. Bellatrix gave him a strange look.

"I wasn't trying to!" he protested.

She just shook her head and went back to the battle against Voldemort.

Harry took deep breaths in between spell casting, focusing on his magic as much as he could focus on _anything._ He shivered as his magic stirred, trying to conform to his needs.

_I need focus,_ he thought with some difficulty.

His mind cleared all of a sudden and he nearly fell over. His eyesight sharpened to the point that his glasses impeded him, and sound became much more acute. He could feel the debris through the soles of his shoes. His scar pained him for a brief moment and then something got kicked out in the form of black vapor, which dissolved on contact with the air.

Harry knocked his glasses off his face, realizing for the first time he'd been blind as a bat. Colors and lines were defined in ways that he never knew could be. Spells came, unbidden, half he'd half- or totally-forgotten, to his lips. Dumbledore's spells slowed and then stopped altogether.

He suddenly realized that he was in the middle of his own emerald-green tornado of magic, and that his magic was urging him to toss away the puny sticks and rule Voldemort with no wands.

Harry actually did toss away the old wand he'd been using since his younger years, but kept the one he got in Ollivander's in his non-dominant hand, sending pieces of his green maelstrom towards Voldemort with various results in destruction, making it practically impossible to tell what was going to happen next. And since it was pure, raw magic, it had no shield.

Voldemort was backing up.

Harry slammed down hard, his hands whirling as he bent his magic to his will, his eyes glowing an _Avada Kedavra_ green, filled with lethal intent, striding forward as he made no attempt to dodge or shield against the Dark Lord's increasingly frantic spellfire. The energy just got added to the swirling vortex of magic around him, the spell's intent dissipating.

His posture, facial expressions: distinctly Black. Confident, dangerous, powerful, cold.

Voldemort slammed into a wall, and Harry thrust his now-empty hands into the air, where Voldemort was suddenly suspended and defenseless, Harry's face twisted into a cold sneer.

"You're mortal, Voldie, thought you might want to know that," Harry said, his voice dripping with venom. "Your servants are either idiots or turned. You want to know how I was able to defeat you? I was raised by your most devoted servant, who wanted nothing more than a little bit of affection shown. When I defeated you _the first time_, it was _Trixie_ who took me away from the Muggles who, no doubt, would have despised and belittled me. It was _me_ who showed her love, not revulsion or indifference. It was _me_ who showed her that power _wasn't _love. And _damn you,_ you made her the way she is now. _You_ made her insane. _You_ made her desperate for just a touch of affection, nevermind love. But you and your _Horcruxes,_" Harry spat the word out like it was poison, "deprived you of the notion of things like happiness or love. And by the gods, if you could have made her happy and not _love-starved_, and she had still picked me up off the street, _literally_, I would've followed you to the ends of the earth."

Harry spat in his face. "So now you know that your want for immortality was the thing that caused your downfall. And since _my mother_—in everything but blood, anyway—refuses to kill another person, I'll gladly do it, just for you, since I've already killed you about, what, nine times now? First time, first year, and then all the Horcruxes? Or do the Horcruxes not count as separate kills?"

"**POTTER**!" Voldemort bellowed.

Harry shot a wandless piercing hex at his forehead and let him fall to the ground, watching with morbid curiosity if Voldemort could survive his brains being blown.

He didn't.

Harry turned to be face-to-point with the Headmaster's wand.

"So, that's your reaction?" Harry asked conversationally. "That's it? Pretty tame for finally figuring out that all your carefully-laid plans were fruitless because really, putting a curious tot on the porchstep in the middle of November couldn't _possibly_ go wrong."

Someone in the doorway snorted. It sounded suspiciously like Sirius.

"There's one more Horcrux," Dumbledore said softly. "I can't let Voldemort come back. He comes back one more time and the UK _will_ be conquered."

Harry blinked, not entirely expecting that. "So I have another Horcrux on me? Here, take it, only I have no idea what it is."

"His Horcrux is _you_, Harry," Dumbledore said softly.

"Oh, _that's_ what got kicked out of my scar earlier," Harry exclaimed. Then he frowned. "And Voldemort apparently couldn't count as well as the myriad of other things that he couldn't do, like make a form that doesn't make the average person gag. Could you get your wand out of my face, that's really making me nervous and my magic _really_ doesn't like me nervous."

Dumbledore hesitantly lowered his wand.

Harry relaxed, his sudden adrenaline drop making him feel a little woozy. He was conscious of the darkness of unconsciousness approaching. "Don't mind me, I'm just going to pass out," he said cheerfully.

And he promptly did, fainting dead away.

Bellatrix prevented him from hitting the floor, just barely.

* * *

**Ruby: Soooo...yeah. That's it, for now. I'll probably start on it after I finish ****All Together, Cousins****, which has some serious plot twists coming up. *evil grin* But let me know what you think! I was intending for Harry to chew Sirius out sometime during this, but it never came up, unfortunately. I love Verbal!Harry. You don't see too many of those. XD Make for a hilarious story, though!**

*****FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DON'T READ A/Ns, PLEASE READ!******

**~This story WILL NOT BE CONTINUED (or even truly started) until I finish All Together, Cousins.**

_** ~THIS IS JUST A PREVIEW, AN IDEA PUT TO PAPER (OR SCREEN).**_

**Have a good day!**


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